Popovich?s big edge was that he had LeTim

Joe Alexander, By Buck Harvey - Express-News

Published 11:57 pm, Monday, May 24, 2010

He flew to St. Croix after the draft 13 years ago, and he made a mistake as soon as he picked up his rental car. Gregg Popovich didn’t know he had to drive on the left side of the road in the Virgin Islands.

“I was gesticulating at about 10 people,” Popovich said later, “before I figured out I was the jerk.”

He was right on everything else. He ran on the beach with Tim Duncan, and he built a relationship one grain of sand at a time. Nothing else Popovich did meant more than how he connected with his superstar, and Mike Brown was around to see this firsthand.

Brown surely made mistakes, and he’s not the first to win a lot of games and get fired. He’s the most successful coach in Cavaliers history, and he went to a Finals against the Spurs, but he also did this with a two-time MVP.

This spring undercut him. His offense and rotations stuttered, and his players quit.

But Popovich heard the same over the years, particularly with his predictable offense at the turn of the century. When the Spurs were swept in 2001, they looked as disheartened as the Cavaliers.

The Spurs lost Game 3 to the Lakers by 39 points, then rallied to lose by 29 in the finale.

A promising Global Icon might have distanced himself then. Someone surrounded by childhood buddies and Nike ?execs would have heard he wasn’t at fault.

Duncan, instead, tolerated what he didn’t like about Popovich and accepted the rest. He let himself be coached.

Popovich deserves credit for establishing this kind of credibility. Popovich has always seemed to know when to be crazy or calm, when to yell or joke. He related to the 2004 Olympic team — including LeBron — far better than Larry Brown.

Reading Duncan wasn’t simple, either. Duncan is a complex man with a psychology degree, and something he said 10 years ago, when he was still deciding whether he wanted to remain a Spur, spoke to that.

His favorite movie then was “Good Will Hunting,” and the plot involved a young janitor at Harvard who hid his genius. “I’m just a taller, slightly less hyperactive version of the Matt Damon character in that movie,” Duncan said at the time. “I really liked how he probed people and found out their weaknesses.”

Duncan probed. Yet Popovich used intelligence to earn Duncan’s respect and humor to get through everything else. Duncan chose to stay a Spur, in large part, because of Popovich.

To make that happen, some accommodations were made, with family sometimes flying on the Spurs charter. But these were minor compromises compared to the ones in Cleveland, where pregame playtime was just part of the circus.

This from ESPN.com last week: “Two opposing GMs, without citing specific examples, said they know James has vetoed deals (Danny) Ferry would have made over the past few years.”

The Spurs sought Duncan’s input. But Duncan understood when they told him, for example, friends such as Malik Rose had to be traded.

Duncan was also open to living in San Antonio, and, if he’d ever called himself “King,” it would have been with considerable sarcasm. LeTim could laugh at himself.

He could also blame himself, and he did during the Suns series. He pointed at his free-throw failures and what they were doing to the Spurs, and this is how he’s acted for more than a decade.

LeBron? The blame is always for someone else, and this cuts to what happened to Mike Brown. Unless you are willing to take some responsibility, it’s always going to be someone else’s fault. After an embarrassing second-round exit, Brown became LeBron’s excuse.

Maybe Popovich would have demanded more from LeBron earlier in their relationship. And maybe Brown was too nice.

But, in LeBron, Popovich wouldn’t have gotten what he found in Duncan.